We are very proud that John Russo, our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, brings the renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog to the Kalmanovitz Initiative. The blog is edited by John and Georgetown University’s professor of English Sherry Linkon. It features several regular contributors as well as guest bloggers.

Today’s post, authored by John Russo, makes the case that discussions about the long-term economic struggles of deindustrialized communities and racial inequality would benefit by addressing the influence of neoliberal ideologies and policies.

When we pay attention to the way neoliberalism undermined working-class communities, we too often focus only on the white working class. But as the dozens of news stories about Detroit’s economic struggles makes clear, those same policies had an even more devastating effect on the black working class. In Detroit, discussions of post-industrial decline, the value of “Black Lives,” and economic development converge. The auto industry once offered good jobs, with solid wages and benefits, and that created a strong middle class. Yet African Americans, who now make up the majority of the city’s population, had just barely gained entry to that middle class before economic restructuring literally moved that opportunity out of reach. As Thomas Sugrue has argued, when the auto industry moved its plants to the suburbs, business benefited while black workers struggled.

The reality TV show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo has captivated American audiences. Working-Class Perspectives guest blogger Julia Leyda explores key questions about how viewers interact with the subjects of the show. Does the Honey Boo Boo invite judgment or sympathy? Are we laughing at or with Alana’s family? Is the show humorous because it is cute or because it affirms our prejudices about Southern, white poverty?

Despite constantly misbehaving to annoy the characters who represent middle-class propriety, the women on the show also present themselves and healthy and well-adjusted. They continually proclaim that their self-esteem is intact despite acknowledging that they don’t conform to conventions of feminine beauty and the lack of success in both the child pageant circuit and their various efforts to lose weight. Critic Megan Carpentier points out that while middle-class viewers might expect to feel only condescending disdain for the family, they are often surprised to feel sympathy for them: “so many people find it shocking that they love each other and themselves.” Mama June comes across as a devoted mother doing her best in straitened circumstances, trying to teach her daughters self-respect and self-acceptance. She makes it hard for viewers to scorn the family for their “trashy” behavior by playing into widely held platitudes about self-love and good parenting.

You may read the post in its entirety and check out other Working-Class Perspectives posts on our website.

The renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University professor of English, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

In London, working-class activists adopt boisterous tactics to highlight gentrification. As is often the case, British mainstream media miss the point and ridicule the protesters rather than focus on their message. Today’s Working-Class Perspectives blog post was authored by Sarah Attfield.

Class War’s particular mode of protesting is carnivalesque and mocks the rich and powerful. They use props such as banners, flares, flaming torches, masks, and loud music, and their parades and protests are noisy and colourful. Their intention is to take back the streets, at least for a short time, and make working-class voices heard. According to one member, they are part of a long tradition of the London mob – groups of protestors who have challenged authority and targeted symbols of power (including private property) for centuries.

The renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University professor of English, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

The renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. Today’s post by Jack Metzgar untangles sociologist Allison Pugh’s study of the few winners and many losers of a growing culture of insecurity and what such pervasive insecurity means for labor, community, and political organizers who seek collective action in contemporary America.

Though Pugh does not use the term, what both winners and losers lack is a sense of collective efficacy of even the modest sorts once provided by churches, unions, ethnic lodges, as well as by a more generous welfare state. The winners think they don’t need collective support and action, and in most respects, at least for now, they are right. But the vastly larger group of insecurity-culture losers in our tumbleweed society seem not even aware of collective efficacy as a possibility, and Pugh convincingly argues that their individual ingenuity in making the best of bad situations, often with heroic efforts, undermines both their own long-term efforts to survive and any possibility of effective collective action that could reverse the downward spiral of contingency, precarity, and insecurity rooted in the American workplace.

We are very proud that John Russo, our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, brings the renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog to the Kalmanovitz Initiative. The blog is edited by John and Georgetown University’s professor of English Sherry Linkon. It features several regular contributors as well as guest bloggers.

Today’s post by Tim Strangleman concerns the recent rise of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain’s Labour Party and what his emphasis on class means for the trajectory of left-wing politics in Great Britain.

This era of ‘New Labour’ was marked by a striking reluctance to talk about class, which was seen as part of the vocabulary of ‘old labour’ and a manifestation of the politics of envy. This trend continued even after the economic crash of 2008 and the beginning of the Party’s period of opposition. Corbyn himself rarely uses the word ‘class’, but through his actions and speeches he clearly articulates a class-based understanding of the economy, education, and the workplace. While his leadership election rivals were busy arguing over the extent to which they would match Conservative plans to extend austerity, Corbyn confronted head on the claim that Labour had mismanaged the economy. As Paul Krugman has recently pointed out, the Labour Party has a relatively strong story to tell in economic matters before during and after the crash, but it has allowed the Conservatives and other rivals to paint them as reckless and clueless.

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Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor develops creative ideas and practical solutions for working people that are grounded in a commitment to justice, democracy, and the common good.Learn more